KnowCharge Secures Start-up Capital
October 22, 2009
NBIF invests $100,000 to fund the commercialization of university research
FREDERICTON, NB - KnowCharge Inc. today secured an additional investment of $100,000 in venture capital from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. The funds will support the commercialization of the company’s electrostatic protective and anti-counterfeit paper based products. KnowCharge won second prize and an investment of $50,000 in the foundation’s popular Breakthru Business Plan Competition earlier this year.
The decision comes after KnowCharge started collaborating with ALX Technical Services Inc., of Concord, Ontario, to develop its first static discharging packaging product for use by the electronics industry. ALX Technical, one of the oldest manufacturers of static control products in North America, serving companies like Celestica, IBM and Honeywell, offers several unique products for the electronics industry.
“Our relationship with ALX actually started the night of the Breakthru Awards last March,” says KnowCharge president Robert Morrow, “Ralph Cilevitz, the President of ALX saw the television story CBC did about us, did the 411 on my name, called my home and got my cellphone number, and then called me—right in the middle of the awards ceremony. Talk about good timing…a little serendipity.”
From his office at ALX’s Concord head offices, Cilevitz said that new and exciting products don’t come along very often in the static control industry. “I’ve been in this industry for 30 years,” says Cilevitz, “KnowCharge is bringing something innovative and exciting which will enable electronic manufacturers to reduce their costs.”
The effects of static discharge are estimated to cause upwards of 30% of all electronic device failures costing the electronics industry in excess of $100 billion every year, while the costs of product counterfeiting is in the hundreds of billions of dollars globally.
KnowCharge’s conductive paper technology, based on research first developed at the University of New Brunswick, and partly funded by the NBIF, provides a sustainable and cost effective means to build static protection or anti-counterfeit capabilities directly into the DNA of paper. “Any time you can remove the requirement for additional processing, it saves time and money,” says Morrow, “something that’s a core advantage of this technology, and it doesn’t change the recyclability of the paper.”
“Getting KnowCharge off the ground is the perfect example of what we do at the foundation, and what we’d like to see more of,” says NBIF president Calvin Milbury, “and that’s providing equity capital to entrepreneurs that take an interest in the research that we support at the province’s universities, and help them get it out into the marketplace.” Milbury says KnowCharge presents a great opportunity for New Brunswick’s forestry industry by adding value to products that it already makes.
The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation is an independent corporation that supports the development of innovation and entrepreneurship in New Brunswick. The Foundation’s mandate is to strengthen the innovation capacity of New Brunswick by making investments in applied research and in new, growth-oriented businesses.